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Motherhen: a "new Mozilla Application" template project

Motherhen screenshot

If you want to use Mozilla's source code to create a new application, with your own user interface, compiled code and/or tests, you should start here. This is a template for the absolute minimum code you need for starting a new application source tree from the mozilla-unified repository.

Concepts

  • Motherhen is a potential replacement for Mozilla Firefox's least-known feature, the -app command-line argument. This little feature allows you to replace the user interface ("chrome" before Google Chrome existed) with your own. Motherhen goes quite a bit further, giving you most of what you need to start a new application from scratch, using Mozilla's build infrastructure, toolkit and API's.
  • Motherhen uses two local copies of Mozilla code.
    1. A "vanilla", or "clean room", repository of the mozilla-unified repository. This one you should not touch: the idea is it doesn't have any of your (or Motherhen's) changes in it, so we can always rely on it as canonical Mozilla code. I create this using your operating system's hg command and Mozilla's Mercurial bundles. By default, it lives in cleanroom/mozilla-unified, and is a git-ignored directory.
    2. An "integration" repository, which is a clone of the "vanilla" repository. This is where your build happens:
      • The "sources" directory of this project contains individual projects, similar to comm-central holding several projects as the comm directory under mozilla-central. Motherhen uses the "sources" directory to create symbolic links in the "integration" repository, so your code edits happen here.
      • Motherhen applies patches (as few as necessary) to the "integration" repository so your project can at least compile and run.
      • From here on, you own the "integration" repository and your copy of the Motherhen template!

Features

Motherhen supports, out of the box:

  • Configuring and creating an integration repository.
  • Invoking mach in the integration repository.
  • Multiple Mozilla source tags.
    • You can test your project code against any valid mozilla-unified tag (release, beta, ESR, or central for example) as you see fit from the same Motherhen repository. (Minimum support is esr102 as of February, 2023.)
    • This allows for checking for regressions between major Firefox releases!
  • Multiple project source directories, so you can build more than one application.
  • Multiple patch sets to apply to Mozilla's code.
  • Verification builds of stock Mozilla Firefox code.

Most of the details are in the configuration file format README.

Caveat emptor, or "Not everything works!"

I've tested this manually in early February, 2023 against mozilla-central, and here's what I see:

Linux MacOS Windows
Creating a repository Working Working Not tested
mach configure Working Working Not tested
mach build Working Working Not tested
mach run Working Working Not tested
mach package Working Broken Not tested

Why not Windows?

I don't have a Windows development computer anymore. (January 2023) Please, help me out with developing Motherhen on Windows!

Set-up, build and run

  1. In GitHub, create a new repository by using this repository as a template.
  2. Clone your repository locally.
  3. npm install --save-prod.
  4. npm run setup will launch a command-line wizard to guide you through crafting a Motherhen configuration file. This wizard will eventually ask you for a new project name, and replace "hatchedegg" with it if you give it one.
  5. The wizard will give you a command at the end to run, like ./cli/motherhen.js create. Run this command to set up your integration repository, where Mozilla code and your code will be joined together.
  6. ./cli/motherhen.js mach configure to configure your integration repository.
  7. ./cli/motherhen.js mach build to compile your project.
  8. ./cli/motherhen.js mach run to launch your code.
  9. ./cli/motherhen.js mach package (Linux only for now) to create a package for others to use.

Other useful commands and options

  • ./cli/motherhen.js mach is your gateway to the mach program.
  • ./cli/motherhen.js where tells you where your integration and "vanilla" repositories are.
  • --config=(path/to/configuration) lets you specify an alternate Motherhen configuration file, if you so desire.
  • --project=(project name) lets you choose a project other than your default.
    • Think testing your project against mozilla-beta, instead of mozilla-release. This means you can check your project against multiple versions of Mozilla's source code, including "ESR" builds.
  • --firefox=(firefox project) lets you work with a Firefox verification build instead. It is mutually exclusive with the --project option.
  • ./cli/motherhen.js help or npm run help will get you basic help information.

Motherhen's own testing and development

Don't do this, unless you're working on fixing bugs in Motherhen itself. package.json has lots of testing steps.

npm install --save-dev
npm run test:setup
npm run test:create
npm run test:where
npm run test:configure
npm run test:build
npm run test:run
npm run test:package

Extremely useful documentation

Though if you're here, you've probably already bookmarked these years ago!

Credits (or, "really good open-source utilities")

Many thanks to the creators and contributors of these great npm projects:

Special thanks to nodejs.org for a fantastic JavaScript command-line application.

Of course, the largest thanks go out to Mozilla. Twenty years, and a career I've built so far on your code. I still have the red-star t-shirt from the Mozilla 1.0 release party in 2002, even if it doesn't fit anymore.

s/love/code/g